WITNESS ANNOUNCEMENT - New Witness on the block - Partnering with @davemccoy

Please accept my declaration to become a STEEM Witness.

To give you a better picture of who I am and to get an idea about my intentions, I will cover the following points in this post:

My Background

Community Building

Witness Partner

My Dev work

Bid Bots

Paid Witness Votes

Witness Setup

Hello, Hejsan, こんにちは。

I would like to begin by telling you a bit about myself. My name is Daniel, an IT Engineer with a long background in the IT industry, working mainly with networks and security. I have been coding and scripting in various languages both as a hobby and part of my professional career. Python is an especially useful tool for a network and security engineer and I was very excited when I realized I could use my coding skills after I got involved in the STEEM blockchain.

I'm Swedish, and I speak, in addition to Swedish, English and Japanese (to some extent... :)) And for any Dutch speakers, please feel free to try me out. 😄So please reach out to me in one of these languages. For everything else, there is Google translate. 😉

When I joined Steemit I quickly realized the power of interaction, and what an important role comments play on the platform. I will never forget the welcome message from @sirwinchester, with his cool animation, and the warm welcome from @teamsteem and @playfulfoodie. They had a big impact on me after I had published my introduction post.

I started to actively write my blog in May 2017 and I joined the Minnowsupport project in June, only a few days after @aggroed and @ausbitbank had kicked it off. Through the Minnowsupport Project I learned the importance of networking outside of Steemit and I met some extraordinary people, and I got many ideas for various projects.

Comment Challenge

My longest running initiative is the Steemit Comment Challenge, which I started in mid-June 2017. I'm currently up to round number #26 and with the current schedule, there is a new challenge released every Sunday.

I did a quick summary of all the prize money during the last 25 rounds. In total I’ve paid out 418 SBD. In addition, I've recently started to give away SP delegations and have so far delegated 2600 SP split into several 1 week periods.

Although I understand the importance of community building, my biggest weakness is probably in sales and self-promotion. For this reason, I have found a great partner which I think will be a perfect complement for my witness campaign.

I'm happy to introduce my PR & Sales Manager, @davemccoy. 😀 I got to know Dave after I featured one of his posts, and he has been, by far, the most awesome person I met through my Comment Challenge.

Dave has an enormous drive and his engagement on Steemit is outstanding. He is one of the co-founders of the Newbieresteem initiative, found under the #newbieresteemday tag or on Newbieresteem's Discord server, and it is absolutely remarkable what he has achieved in this short time.

Dave joined Steemit little over 3 months ago, but in this time he has helped a great number of people and encouraged them in the best possible way.

Most of my Steem development activities have been linked to the Minnowsupport project and I have, for example, built 4 different bots.

@Minnowsupport - As far as I know, this is the biggest community bot in terms of users and votes. It is free for all registered users as long as the content is inline with the Minnowsupport project’s guidelines. The current user base is above 17K and with active management from the Moderators, the number of votes are kept below 2000 per day. 2000 votes is the current daily average maximum when allowing the voting power to recover.

Pond Patrol - This bot is a pure Discord bot with the purpose of keeping channels clean of Steemit link spam. It keeps track and warns abusers, and notifies Mods in case of repeated violations.

"The Law" - This is the bot, "You know who", which name shall not be said. 😄This is the brain behind the MSP Blacklist. A blacklist with currently over 3000 banned users. The bot allows easy administration of the blacklist, it can mute accounts, pull votes and updates a Google spreadsheet which is publicly available.

@Dorabot - This was initially my personal helper, which has now transformed into an MSP/PALnet exclusive bot.

Among other various projects, I have been helping @freezepeach to build a bot to neutralize flags. It started out as a simple script but has now a Discord interface with an option to neutralize flags for a single post or for a user's all posts and comments.

Public blacklist

Something I have in the pipeline is to make the MSP blacklist available in a different format. Currently, it is only available as a read-only Google spreadsheet.

The idea is to provide an API which will allow queries for blacklisted users. The idea is also to provide a dump of the full list and possibly also allow filters to only dump a list of users belonging to a specific ban category.

As this is a hot, and somewhat infected, topic I want to share with you my view.

I am not fundamentally against bid bots and I have used them myself. With the current Hard Fork I think they are a part of the eco-system and the economic forces surrounding it. But I think they unfortunately take the focus away from good content creation and I think the community would be better without them.

I have recently changed my point of view and this has led me to change the way I use the bots.

The reasons for using bid bots I would divide into two categories, Post Promotors or Cash Generators.

Post Promotors

This is to make your post more visible. The goal would either be to spread a message or to indirectly increase profits by the upvotes received due to the increased exposure. The ROI is not an important factor, the main thing is to maximize publicity.

Cash generator

Here ROI is everything! The goal is purely to increase your post earnings. Getting a good bid is crucial as the return can otherwise easily turn into the negative.

A majority of people using bid bots I would say fall into the second category. And they use the Steem Bot Tracker developed by @yabapmatt to find opportunities and to maximize ROI.

Bid Bot Conclusion

Even with a positive result, I’ve started to think that bid bots do more harm than help. If I find a post with huge bot votes, I would be discouraged to upvote myself. And this feeling would be magnified if it is a new user. I’m excited to help newbies on this platform, but if someone thinks bid bots are the path to success, I would assume they are in no need of help and I would be less encouraged to act.

Furthermore, if I see a post on Trending which ended up there because of paid votes, it has to be a pretty damn good post for me to not get discouraged. And if we are talking about such "damn" good quality, it would probably end up on Trending anyway... 😉

If I’m thinking this way I’m sure there must be others feeling the same.

For this reason, I have changed my own habits. I have up to recently only used bid bots on my contest posts, as a way to boost prize payouts, but I have now decided to stop that as well. Although I've returned the extra profit to the contestants, I feel the negative aspects still applies. I also want my actions to be consistent and fully transparent as I take the step to become a STEEM witness.

An Ethical Whitelist Vote Bot

I have actually been working on a project for some time, that involves a new type of vote bot. It is a 100% whitelisting bot and it was my aim to create the most ethical vote bot out there. But as my negative sentiment for vote bots has increased this hasn't really been a priority. At this point I might abandon this idea completely. Please stay tuned to find out more.

Although I have no experience yet being a witness, I’ve heard rumors that there are people engaged in witness vote selling.

I have no clue how widespread it is so I just have to wait and see. I just want to make it clear that I will not accept this behavior. And you can be sure I will report back if I get exposed to it.

I’m currently running a server hosted in Germany with the following specs:

Intel i7

64 GB DDR3 RAM

2 x 2TB HD

1 Gbps connectivity and high-speed Internet

My idea is to get a backup server as soon as I start to climb in ranking. Due to my Japanese connections, I would love to host a witness node in Japan, but I would have to see if it is financially feasible.

As you know I am very very honored to be your "sales manager/promoter" and I will do my best to help you get as much awareness as possible. We need community-minded witnesses like you that understand how important engagement is at all levels, especially with the newbies and minnows. If we ever want to grow as a platform, then engagement by real humans is key.

I am so excited to know that you are stepping up and I am 100% confident in you as a person and know you have our backs. I mean all the "little people" that want to see this as a wonderful social platform where we can share, play games, and make real connections..

You will be great and I'm happy to fully support you and a few more new witnesses like @abh12345 and @paulag from @steemcommunity. I know we can leverage our various connections to find ways to improve the experience for everyone! In fact this is so important, that I am making it my number 1 priority until you both make it into the top levels and can have real influence.

I'm honored to have you by my side and I hope we can do something awesome out of this. As you said, "engagement by real humans is key". A lot of today's delegated SP need to be made available for curation and not wasted on bid bots. We will most likely need a system change to see any bigger changes. Curation is just not profitable enough to compete with the bid bot service. But let's work together to at least spread the word and hopefully we will end up a bit closer to the "perfect world". :)

I will do my best and really believe in you :)... I have crafted this banner to show you one way I would like to get the word out... Please tell me how it looks and let me know if you would like to make any adjustments.

ps.. "Payable Pennies" is a concept that I will leave at least 3.0 pennies so that they will get paid.. Most people don't even know they don't get paid below 1.9 pennies (or something close to that number).

Congratulations, these Payable Pennies are my way of supporting @danielsaori for witness to build this community from the bottom up!

Congratulations, these Payable Pennies are my way of supporting @danielsaori for witness to build this community from the bottom up!

Allow users to toggle on a feature that would present a CAPCHA when they went to upvote. Such non-spammer/non-bot upvotes would be run through the n^2 calculation for reward payout and all non-CAPCHA treated as n ().

I come to know about you because of @beeyou and @davemccoy. They both are doing fantastic job for the community and from your post I learned you are also doing a lot. So, one of my witness votes definitely goes to you.

This is great news.
At this time, wonderful people become witnesses.
Recently he became a witness @Noisy.And suddenly this announcement comes.@Danielsaori, you got my vote, although not too strong, but dedicated with great joy.

I had the opportunity to get to know you as a wonderful man. You are a great man who works tirelessly for the entire community.
You are a curator who does not hesitate to support every good author. You are always full of optimism and joy and spreading them around you. You will never refuse to help or advise.
You teach many new and older Steemians what's the most important to Steemit. You learn that good content, not only in posts but also in comments, is more important than stupid and unnecessary speech. The appealing futility can get a great reward, but in a few days no one will remember it. But good words can help someone in a few years because they stay in the blockchain.

Daniel, I wish you only the best, many successes and lots of witness votes.Stay as you are and you will certainly be much better.

I may have to stop being lazy using a proxy and go vote your witness. You have been a godsend to many projects I'm involved in, and you are definitely one of best steemians I know of. I just hope your PR man can effectively convey the level of professionalism that I have personally witnessed in the months of interaction with you.

I can dig it but why would you want to nutralize flags. that is the only thing keeping trending eaven remotely under control from becoming a puss infected gaping wound that just so happens to also be the face of steemit to new comers. I mean look at jerry banfield shamelessly bot voting his post to over $2000 . that is PATHETIC . Flags are the only thing keeping him and the hajins in check from raping the reward pool daily.

@freezepeach would be better suited to answer. But I know their mission is linked to free speech, where they try to help people being flagged due to opinion disagreement. Normally these are small accounts as well, so it wouldn't have anything to do with the trending pages.

I hope that helps. I can get someone behind the @freezepeach account if you want a more in-depth follow-up.

i would be fine with it if it helps minnow accounts that get smashed by whales but i would be 100% against it if it was used by the trending A holes. I will go give it a look see and try to figure it out a bit.

Sorry I didn't get back to you about MaM. I will ping you later on Discord. I'm aiming to have it ready by the end of the week.

I have been thinking about starting my own node, but it requires some big investments to pull it off. If my witness goes well, it would definitely be on my list. I would probably start with a private node dedicated to all my MSP related apps/bots, and then expand from there.

Why are all the witness announcements made during work hours? I have to go hunt down my active key to make my witness vote! It was the same for @steemcommunity. :)

You have my small SP support. I even checked steemd to make sure the witness vote holds (had to vote three times). I found out with my last witness vote that votes for anyone outside the top 50 don't always take. You have to cast the vote twice, even three or four times for some. Who knew?

Very happy to see this announcement Daniel. You have shown tremendous support to the redfish and minnows. Happy to be able to show some support back to you.

Smart of you to choose @davemccoy as your PR & Sales Manager! 😀 I've only known Dave a few short months, but he is a force onto himself. He does amazing work supporting fellow redfish and minnows on here. I'm proud to be part of his #newbieresteemday community.

Congratulations on this big step forward. I know you and many others have the Steemit community at heart.

Great news for the Steemit community to see two very influential and community minded Steemians join forces! It's fantastic to see the effort that @davemccoy has put into the different communities and initiatives is going to create a force to drive positive changes in the form of another witness who has been a long time contributor and supporter for the positive growth of Steem!

I will also be helping to spread the word to my little corner of Steemit :)

Congratulations, these Payable Pennies are my way of supporting @danielsaori for witness to build this community from the bottom up!

Thank you Plushzilla for your support!
Focusing on long-term growth is the best we can do for this community, and for the price of STEEM. It should be a priority for all, especially for those with a big stake.

Saw your link on the Minnowsupport Project Discord channel :) I also work in the IT Industry, Network/Security and scripting primarily - Moved over to more of a business systems support these days and love to support new Witnesses! :)

Thank you for your support! I really appreciate it.
How long have you been part of MSP and what do you think about it?

My better half is Japanese and it is basically my 2nd home. :) My plan is to start to post in Japanese, or mixed english/japanese, but haven't got around to do that. I would really like to support the Japanese community and to get my wife to start her own blog. Let's see how it will go...

Great that you "rejoined" steemit in December, hopefully it won't be something you will regret.
Interesting that we started our blogs around the same time. You posted for the first time on 10th of May and I did my entry 11 days later. :)

I will try to focus on some of these Japanese posts, something I wanted to do for a long time. You should do it as well, it would be a good practice for sure.

I don't regret it at all! :) Do you enjoy being a Witness and did you have any second thoughts about diving in and being a Witness when it seems so difficult to break even? Or do your activities on Steem cover for that or make it worthwhile? :D

Have you thought about/done any radio show interview on MSPWAVES at all?

Would love to see your posts in Japanese & I definately need to blog more - Been busy with worth and ideas were really non-existent at the moment.

Appreciate your support!
Regarding the bots, it can be exciting to use them for quick rewards, but you risk to miss out on organic votes by doing so. And I have seen many of the bots introduce a 10% profit limit(luckily a loss limit as well), which will allow the bot owners to squeeze in more rounds in a day, to optimize their own profits.
But your profit as a user will never be above 10% in this case.

I want to add to that and say you can get both, with godlike comments.

First, you need a post, a good, cool, awesome, or at least a pretty decent, post. ;)

Second, you spend the majority of your time writing awesome comments. Write comments that will attract the attention of the author. Out of this, you might gain 3 things:

Comment upvotes

The author will visit your blog and upvote

The author will follow, which will be the seed of a loyal fan.

Spend time to comment on a mix of users with different account sizes. Always comment on topics that interest you and which matches your blog, but comment on both newbies, minnows, dolphins, and whales. Just don't spend all your time on dolphins and whales.

Thanks for your support.
It would be great if we can increase awareness among users and delegators, but I think a system change is necessary to have any major impact. For example, curation rewards need to be adjusted to create an incentive for delegators to focus on curation instead of delegating to these bots.

One possibility I have envisioned is to cause high SP votes in relation to the current post payout to be shared more with the curators than the author. That is if a high SP (botvote) hits an article with a current payout of .50 and has a vote of 25.00, then based on a logarithmic scale, up to 50% would go to the curators, not just 25%

This does not take any large blockchain reviews and is nothing more than simple math. It makes using bots unprofitable. It would not affect normal vote flow and rewards and also highly encourages larger whales to seek out unnoticed work.

I think this platform has really helped minnows like me to have faith and deliver great posts, we get educated on a daily and i can boldly say i am a better writter now.. Thanks @danielsaori .. I wish you all the greatest things in you new feat

Indeed, the focus should be on creating amazing content that brings value to the platform, it shouldn't be about gaming the bots. More users having the opportunity to be hit by big curators such as @curie is what we need. If all SP would be redistributed to curators instead of bid-bots, everyone would have a much stronger incentive to produce awesome content.

I love your perspective here in Steemit! I'm glad to see more powerful people speaking up against bid bots because of the 2nd category. I don't mind it as a promotion tool but let's get real, that's not what it is being used for. It does create harm. I almost got discouraged here when I found that you can buy your success reputation. Thank you for becoming a witness because we need more people like you who are for what's good for the community long term. I will be casting my vote for you!

And your PR and Sales Manager @davemccoy is doing a really great job! Got this good news from him. I shall spread the word :)

Thank you! I will try to do my best together with @davemccoy to spread the word. Something needs to be put in place to create a strong incentive for bid bots users to stop bidding and for delegators to stop delegating.

Finally! I've reserved a witness spot for you since your last announcement and now it's filled. You got my tiny vote, hehe. 😄

Suggestion for the whitelist-bidbot. I think the biggest problem would be maintaining the whitelist. If you are going to launch this, you can cooperate with other manual curators. Shanehug & smartsteem are manually creating the whitelist and if you can get the list it would be a lot easier.

I will have to see about the vote bot. It is not a traditional bid bot. I wrote it first as a gift/tip bot where you could only send gifts to other users. But that can be abused and only lead to multiple accounts or friends sending gifts to each other, so I changed it to reduce complexity. Perhaps with a proper support system for the whitelist, it might be possible to manage this to prevent self-votes.

The whitelist will take a lot of work to manage, but perhaps it is doable in a community like MSP, where there is already a system in place to deal with registration checks and blacklist management.

Nice to meet you :) I agree with you in regards to bot's. I have to admit I don't really know how to employ one, but I like the idea of people just communicating and commenting and up-voting content they really enjoy.

The price feed is needed for the "peg" of SBD to $1USD. 1 SBD is by design meant to be worth $1 USD, this is how it is treated internally, so the task for witnesses is to fetch the STEEM market price to maintain this system peg.

In real life, SBD is not pegged to USD, but currently worth more than $2. This is why some of the calculations are a bit weird, like the big loss in overall return if you go for 100% powerup compared to 50/50 payout.

Please let me know if you have some more questions or if the explanation was not clear. :)

Aha. Thank you for that explanation @danielsaori. It's starting to make a bit more sense now.

So, is this strictly an internal peg? Steemit takes an average of all witness price feeds and works out the calculations from there? Is this weighted so the top tier witnesses feed carries more weight?

Thanks for explaining. I'm a nuts and bolts kinda guy and have never run across anything telling how this works...

Yes, it is only an internal peg. The system believes SBD is always worth 1USD, so currently, you would need 2.8 SBD to buy 1 STEEM. But in the open market, both STEEM and SBD are now worth roughly $2.8 USD. :)

The price data for each processed block carries the same weight, but as the Top20 witnesses produce a block roughly every minute, their feeds are more important, so overall it carries a bigger weight.

I don't know the exact inner-workings of the calculations, but it is an average over the last 3 days.

The blockchain is not aware of market prices, so it is the role of witnesses to fetch this data and feed it into the system. And this is used to make SBD worth $1 USD. (which in real life is not true as SBD is currently worth $2.8 USD ;) )

For this reason, I have changed my own habits. Until recently, I only used offer bots in my contest publications as a way to increase the prizes, but now I have decided to stop it as well. Although I have returned the extra benefit to the contestants, I feel that the negative aspects still apply. I also want my actions to be consistent and fully transparent as I take the step to become a witness for STEEM.

it has been a good reason for me to support you in this new project, since hce little I participate in your contest of comments and although I have never won, I feel enthusiastic every week, I like to vote for witnesses who are involved with the platform, who communicate, that interact and above all that support, I hope not to change my vision of you, as far as your association with @davemccoy I love, he is very enthusiastic and always (in what I have seen) is attentive and active for everyone who needs it, I feel that you will do a great job, for the above mentioned, count on me.
(I also hope you are open to listening to the Spanish-speaking community)
Happy evening, sorry for my mistakes in English, I use a translator

Congratulations to you and @davemccoy for taking this step!! It is people such as yourselves who are both so community minded that will make this platform awesome!! I gave my proxy to @abh12345 some time ago, so Asher, I hope you see this because I need you to figure out a way to get rid of one of my 30 and add this one instead. And yes, I know that's not how a proxy works, so think of this as merely a really strongly desired suggestion :)

Hello @danielsaori...I want to thank you for the amazing support and the work you have done with @freezepeach. It has helped a lot of steemians in the circles I travel in, who were subjected to multiple flagging. I have shown my appreciation by voting you as a witness. TY very much!

Hi Artgirl, "The law" :) is an internal MSP bot used to simplify the work with the blacklist. The blacklist is mainly used by the minnowsupport bot to fight abuse. It is not a bot on Steem, it only lives on Discord. :)